Happy Hour Salon: Ottessa Moshfegh and Carlus Henderson

Please join Room 220 as we host the season’s second Happy Hour Salon with authors Ottessa Moshfegh and Carlus Henderson from 6 – 8 p.m. on Friday, April 5, at the Press Street HQ (3718 St. Claude Ave.). As always, this event is free and open to the public, and complimentary libations will be on hand (though we strongly encourage donations).

Ottessa Moshfegh, though yet to publish a book, is one of the country’s best young short story writers. She renders decrepitude, sadness, and isolation in exquisite prose that leaves room for the possibility of beauty—if not by describing it, then by channeling it. She is a deeply funny writer, and as editor David McLendon wrote, her stories “maybe cause a bit of discomfort.” But Moshfegh presents her characters’ pitiful hopelessness so artfully a reader can’t help but be filled with gratitude for the small bits of bliss and victory available in a generally horrendous world. Her fiction has appeared in many of the nation’s best journals (and others that are at least respectable), including the Paris ReviewNOONGuernica, the Columbia Review, Unsaid, SleepingfishFence, and Vice. She has won a slew of fancy awards and lives in Los Angeles.

Read a post about Moshfegh and her work on Room 220.

Carlus Henderson is a Zell Fellow in the MFA program at the University of Michigan who splits his time between Detroit and New Orleans. He has also won a number of fancy awards, and has been a high school teacher in New Orleans, a cheese salesman in Vermont, and a dockworker along the Eastern seaboard. You can hear a slightly scratchy recording of his melodious voice here.

This reading is funded in part by a grant from South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as Poets & Writers.

South Arts